Dreams and Realizations

GSoC

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Hello everyone,
This week we have been working on editing the code to reach the standards along side running the tests. A decent amount of time has been spent on documentation. Plot methods and 3d co ordinates seem to be taking a longer time and even Miguel is giving this a good thought, so as of now these remain still in the thinking phase. In the meantime Miguel has shared some great work regarding the implementation of HOMFLY polynomial, stronger invariant to distinguish links. I am enjoying myself going through it as it shows how it is related to few other things which are of interest to me. Here is the link for it

So as a part of it I have implemented the dowker notation which is nothing but the (Ux, Ox) that is under-cross, over-cross at a particular crossing. This was a straight forward implementation as we had everything already present the PD code and the orientation of the crossings. In addition to this we have been working on the code to make it better and more cleaner. We have dropped the support to take in key words, now it is just that we directly give in the input for the link (the user need not mention whether it is a braid, PD_Code, or oriented gauss code) we have made it possible to detect from the way the user inputs what kind of input it is. There are few minor issues with code refactoring which we have been working on. Here is the link for the latest code :

Hello everyone,
There has been a delay this time. This week I have worked on cleaning the code and I am trying to get to the standard required as well trying to clear the bugs which come along. I have been studying the theory on plotting (not really the theory but the components required for implementation). The inspiration mainly comes from Graph theory and network flows. I have been trying to understand what is going in the Spherogram package where they try to generate the data required for the plot and use plink to get the diagram using this data. The focus has been on to achieve the data they have got and use it via the sage methods rather than directing it to plink. The code is mainly present in the orthogonal.py file and they have used orthogonal representations to generate the plot. The one thing which is basic and still not clear is what are they considering as vertices. While I was working on this, I and Miguel had a meeting on Monday and we had some issues to be resolved before we moved forward. I have resolved the issues which were arising in the seifert_to_braid method and have added the __repr__ method. The issue with seifert_to_braid was with the ordering of the seifert_circles. Previously the idea was to find the intersection of the seifert circles with others (as initially we had used the idea of consecutive numbers for naming the edges) by adding a one and subtracting and checking on the intersection. But I over looked this part when I worked on the extension to links and it stuck me here, that I had to even edit this. Now I have edited this part and now we check for the intersection of seifert circles with the pd code, remove all the crossings which share the seifert circle numbering and at the same time select one of the crossings which share the seifert circle and construct a variable which had only parts other than the seifert circle. Now we use this to find the intersection with the other seifert circles and so on and so forth, in this way we order the seifert circles. The __repr__ method has been straight forward. I have removed the method smallest equivalent and replaced the name of the link_number with ncomponents.

Moving on I worked with Jones polynomial, I had this doubt whether the smoothing would depend on the orientation of the crossing. The answer was that it does not and that made my things easy as I had to just refine the earlier code which took into consideration the orientation of the crossing. So now I can say atleast the Kaufmann’s polynomial works fine, to get to the Jones polynomial, I would have to replace the polynomial variable by t^(1/4) for which I have been searching around with no answers. I would be working on the plot methods this week and try to see if I can get something out.

This is the last week before the pencils down, however I will try to continue the work and blog accordingly. I have learnt a lot during these two months, it has been a fascinating journey and I would be continuing my work post GSoC on making things better. I hope you have enjoyed reading the posts (sometimes I have not moved into the details, because I wanted to keep it simple). I will be continuing to blog my posts and hopefully the work till now can get me across the final evaluation.

I would like to leave you with some examples of Jones polynomial (without the t^(1/4) substitution) and also the work till now.

PS: I mentioned in the previous blog that 3d input was the priority, but as 3d inputs and plot were more related, I choose to work on the latter. 3d inputs require projecting the lines into 2d but I have not found any methods around which would make things easier. Plot looks to be more achievable. Yet I will work on the 3d inputs but for now the plot seems more interesting.

Hello everyone,
This week we mainly focused on jones polynomial. The orientation method had few edits and we are expecting it to be fine. I started out with the implementation of jones polynomial, the previous version where the trip matrix was used was restricted to knots. That method mainly used the oriented gauss code but in this implementation we have used the PD code so that it would work for links as well. I have tried to comment in the code the method I have followed, the outline of the procedure has been taken fromhttp://katlas.math.toronto.edu/wiki/The_Jones_Polynomial#How_is_the_Jones_polynomial_computed.3F.

There are few things which remain to be implemented, mainly like accepting the 3d coordinates and HOMFLY polynomial. Few methods have to be renamed and a I guess there is work remaining in the documentation part of the code. This week the focus would be on accepting 3d coordinates and converting it to PD code that would allow the conversion to braid or oriented gauss code. So the target for the week would be
1. 3d coordinates (the priority)
2. Renaming the methods
3. Storing (this has been pending for a good amount of time, the idea is once something related is computed we store it, this is being achieved by creating an object which is not an efficient way of doing things).

Hopefully I can get the above things working. That’s it from me and thanks for reading through.

Hello everyone,
The last week we focused on extending the current functionality to links. That involved a lot of refactoring the code. The methods have become more general and work for links. Some of the issues like naming of the methods and storing once a form of representation is calculated are some of the few which remain to be worked upon. This has been a great learning curve for me. Many things were edited which includes addition of the method orientation which gives the signs of the crossings. That was really helpful in formulating the other structures. There was one other issue in the vogel move, this had a case where the pulling of the higher strand onto the lower one did not lead to a generalization on constructing the new crossings. The issue was resolved as we looked upto the strands in the regions and decided how the crossings would be generated. If the strands were positive, one kind of crossing were obtained and if the strands were negative the other crossings were obtained. I had this thought but I was not sure whether it would work for all cases, Miguel chipped in and gave me the idea in a more concrete setting. So that set the method vogel move up. The rest was revamped and a lot of cleaning has been taking place in the code to remove the stuff which is not necessary. Hope we have most of the functionality by the end. That’s it from me. Thanks for reading through and here is the latest pull request.

Hello everyone,
The last week we focused on the conversions. Some parts are ready for the knots, in sense the standard input conversion is done but there is lots more to add to it. We are returning the braid word as of now where we need to return the braid itself. That would give access to the other methods like the Seifert Matrix and Alexander polynomial. As of now we are thinking of conversions for the links. The braid to pd code has been edited. We no longer maintain the order the crossings, it is just that we encounter a crossing and we start numbering , previously we used to trace the braid out and then order the crossing accordingly. This week the focus is on converting pd code to braid for links, but it seems that we need to even consider the signs for the crossings, this might affect the way we have been considering the pd code uptil now. There is one more way we can look at the pd code that is assign four new numbers at each crossing, that would completely change the way we have looked at the pd code and would also call for lot of re implementation. I guess considering the signs should be the possible way out for the pd code of the links. In knots we did not have this problem as it was a more structured structure. This is taking a lot of time than expected. Hopefully we have the implementation for links and all issues resolved by this week. Still there is the invariants which have to be implemented (the conway, homfly) but for now the focus is totally on the conversions. That’s it from me. Thanks for reading through. And here is the pull request for the week.

Hello everyone,
This week we have made an attempt at implementing the Jones Polynomial. We have used the trip matrix of the knot to determine the Jones polynomial. The trip matrix of a knot is determined by the following process. We number the crossings randomly, and we start moving along the knot, let T be the matrix and T ij be the elements. Now we start with the crossing i and see how many times we have encountered the crossing j until we return to the crossing i. We take mod2 of this value and fill that matrix element. So in this way we construct all the elements except the diagonal elements. For the diagonal elements we see whether i is a positive cross or negative cross. If it is a positive cross we fill it with zero and for the negative cross we fill it with 1. Now we have the initial trip matrix. To evaluate the Jones polynomial we smooth the crossings until we have a link for which we know the Kauffman’s bracket. So this decomposition here is looked by the matrix. So for the initial diagonal elements of the trip matrix we assign a certain type of smoothing and determine the number of seifert circles. Now we construct a new matrix by doing the following, we choose a crossing and smooth it in another way(different from the first), the only elements which are different from the initial matrix are the diagonal elements and the only element which changes when we do such kind of a smoothing is the crossing number element. In sense if we change the smoothing at crossing i we change the number at the matrix element T ii (this is flipped from either one to zero or zero to one). Again we continue this until all the options are exhausted. Then for every matrix we have certain coefficients of the jones polynomial. Adding all these up gives the jones polynomial for the knot. I know it is tough to follow but that is the gist of the algorithm. I have followed the following material and I request the readers to have a look at them for greater understanding.

Second Reference :
A matrix for computing the Jones Polynomial of a Knot by Louis Zulli

We have dedicated some time for documenting the code that we coded till now. There have been some edge cases where the code showed some inconsistency. We are working on the edge cases as well as cleaning the code alongside continuing the implementation of the invariants.
Here is the pull request for the week:

Hello everyone,
The past week has been really on the thinking end. The task was to detect the braid word from the oriented gauss code. So I mentioned the dots were to be connected, but then I had problems implementing it. I was thinking more and more rather than a looking for the straight implementation. It took me a week to break through and then I had some consistent results. So they were various ideas on how one could detect the braidword. One was to update the outgoing strands after each crossing has been looked into and then match it with were we have the incoming. I was working on various other ideas as well as I felt there was some kind of difficulty on the implementation end. Here are the gists of code on the ideas I worked upon.

This was like I had all the answers yet I was missing something. There are some glitches still though, small condition on the seifert circles one is missing. I need to work on the documentation end as we are missing on that. And here is the pull request for the past two weeks.